1The Creation of Ramadan
Ramadan was blessed. Of course, as with everyone—the blessed and the bewitched alike—he didn’t always feel the pleasures of being his natural, divine self. Indeed, he would sometimes become tempestuous and unruly, losing himself and the ability to sense his great fortune even to be alive. And he would stomp around his grandmother’s house, gritting his teeth and growling like a madman, or rather like a mad little boy, because at the age of five, say, for the purposes of introduction, and with a scrawniness that made some refer to him as “skinny as a rail,” he couldn’t really quite pull off madman.
The sight or just the sound of Ramadan tearing through her house at 1216 St. Philip Street in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans never failed to crack his grandmother up. “My little bull,” an amused Mama Joon mumbled to herself whenever she detected the telltale signs of one of his tantrums beginning in the front room. His pitter-pattering and bovine grunts would echo down the hall to her in the kitchen, and she would snatch a dishrag from her shoulder, extend it in a flapping motion, and wait for the little raging Ramadan to enter the room where she stood, crouched, anticipating his charge. The image of a laughing Mama Joon waving her dirty towel never failed to seize the child’s attention and refocus his mind, like music or motion pictures. That vision of her—combined with the intoxicating smells of whatever she was cooking and the warmth radiating from the stove—would stop him in his manic tracks, returning him to himself. He would again relish the comfort of breathing normally, not snorting, not huffing, his madness becoming, in an instant, play, and the bone-deep longing that fueled his fury would manifest as farce. He would scuff his little Nikes backwards on the old hardwood floor, preparing his advance; wiggle his index-finger horns at his temples (comically disregarding the rigidity of horns); and tilt his head down so that when he made his cushioned leap into Mama Joon’s aproned torso he could nestle his neck into the side of her ample belly. She would hug his waist and leverage his forward momentum into an upside-down flip, ending with Ramadan’s feet pedaling before her eyes, the vibrations of his sudden, riotous laughter tickling her into a heightened state of amusement as well. Not exactly Abbott and Costello, perhaps. But their interaction had for the players—who were their own audience—the strange allure of low-budget regional theater. Sincere entertainment for a limited constituency. Imagine the quaint production of a classic drama succumbing to too much sentimentality; or being played, somewhere in the suburb of a suburb, unintentionally, for laughs. Not great. Wouldn’t travel. But, given the quality of the source material, satisfying nonetheless.
If Ramadan’s aunt Clarissa or any of his cousins were around to witness the scene (and they often were because they lived on the other side of Mama Joon’s shotgun double and came sniffing and foraging next door anytime they smelled her cooking or wanted to “borrow” some money), their anxieties would be relieved when the dishrag pantomime began, for secretly they felt threatened by Ramadan and his moody ways. In such moments, their envy, born of their understanding his place of privilege in Mama Joon’s heart, would seethe with a bit less passion. They sensed—quite reasonably—these relatives, these rivals for Mama Joon’s affection and the benefits thereof, that rooted in Ramadan’s temperamental nature was a power, a will far superior to their own, and that his bullishness, were it ever to flourish into its most potent form, a true and virtuous virility, might somehow be employed to destroy them. That they implicitly understood there was something in them that might warrant destruction could be chalked up to the uncanny ability most folks have, without any specialized training, mind you, to assess accurately their worth (or worthlessness, for that matter), the evidence of a persistent white noise of truth. Their fear of Ramadan explained why, at every turn, they stressed the slightness of his form, nudging him about his boniness (as if accentuating this perceived weakness could truly prevent his evolution toward strength and maturity), for it was they, his very kin—whom he loved in spite of their wariness of him—who were the ones, far more so than the random, chubby playground pal or the prematurely muscled schoolmate, who called Ramadan, turning a tease into a taunt, “skinny as a rail.”
* * *
RAMADAN’S EXTREME LEANNESS was a trait he shared with his father, Mustafa Totah, a Syrian transplanted to New Orleans to help his uncle Adad run a small but profitable gas station and convenience store on the corner of North Rampart and Governor Nicholls streets, just a couple of blocks from Mama Joon’s. Ramadan had never met and perhaps never would meet Mustafa, which of course accounted, in no small part, for his profound sense of yearning, an impulse so intense that it sometimes sent him bolting across the borders between species, his being instinctively attempting to substitute a feral closeness to nature for the missing parental bond. Better a wild bull, his psyche had concluded, than an abandoned little boy!
It was in the fall of 1999, less than a year before the birth of Ramadan, when Mustafa had first heard the foreign phrase “skinny as a rail” applied to himself by Alicia Ramsey. A flirtatious and decidedly not “skinny as a rail” New Orleans girl, Alicia had casually offered to cook him a pot of red beans to fatten him up, before leaving him deciphering the simile and her smile. His Arabic ears, preternaturally pricked with suspicion of the American tongue, had heard instead “Skinny Israel.” He had thought it curious that a young woman who was plainly coming on to him would call him that. Accurate as it might have been in a strictly geographic sense (true, Israel was a narrow sliver of a country just to the southwest of his own), it wasn’t a manner of speaking that one could remotely associate with amorous intent. What, after all, did Israel, skinny or otherwise, have to do with him? Was the girl somehow disrespecting him? Was she an American bigot, prone to Middle Eastern insult without even knowing it? Had he misread her interest altogether? Or was this “Skinny Israel” nonsense some sort of romantic mischief, as when a girl says she hates you but secretly desires you intensely? Yes, he liked this latter rationalization. He liked it very, very much. (Mustafa had a way of turning things around in his head for maximum psychological impact that ultimately accrued to his own benefit—in short, he was a pretty regular guy.) American English wasn’t easy, he had learned, and neither, evidently, were American girls.
But, then, Mustafa hadn’t really tried very hard to converse with the young women who frequented the store, mostly because his uncle had warned him, before bringing him to New Orleans, not to become involved with the customers. Uncle Adad had taken his favorite nephew for a long walk through Aleppo Park. When they came to the river’s edge, he stopped, looked Mustafa in the eyes, and said, “Americans are for the good business. Money. Not the bad business.”
By “bad business,” Adad, with a universal finger-poking gesture, had made it clear just what he meant. “I mean love,” he had added—though it was obvious to Mustafa and to anyone in the park who might have witnessed his uncle’s right index finger darting in and out of the tight, fleshy hole he’d formed with his left fist, that Uncle Adad meant something else.
A few months later, there stood thick-legged, brown-skinned Alicia batting her eyelashes at Mustafa as he squatted in the middle aisle of the store unpacking cartons of Wrigley’s gum. “Boy, I need to cook you a pot of red beans.” Then she tossed back over her shoulder as she exited with her bag of chips, “Skinny Israel.” Mustafa had gulped back his linguistic confusion and physical attraction and quickly returned his attention to restocking the racks with white, green, and yellow packs of Spearmint, Doublemint, and Juicy Fruit.
Lately, he had begun to take this particular task much more seriously, for on a recent afternoon, fascinated by all he did not know about these colorfully designed objects, he had sat at the computer in the store’s backroom office and searched “Juicy Fruit.” Several mouse clicks later, he found himself transported across the World Wide Web to a place he’d never dreamed of venturing, www.wrigley.com. In retrospect, he thought he must have been searching for the key to the success of a product devoted to idle chewing, trying to solve the mysterious case of the ever-disappearing cases of Wrigley’s. He navigated his way through the corporate website and discovered, quite by happenstance, the core principle explaining the surprising necessity for his own employment, the constant need to refill the bins with such a modest and seemingly unnecessary commodity. The simple words—which moved Mustafa almost to tears, once he had translated them—were positioned next to the photograph of one William Wrigley, Jr., the great man behind the gum. Yes, Mustafa had decided in an instant Mr. Wrigley was indeed great. Only a great man, a man of rare humility and vision, would dare imagine that something so common, so lowly as chewing gum, something famous for sticking to the bottom of one’s shoe, could be the basis of an empire. And—only a great man could be as expressive about the reason for his own greatness. Mr. Wrigley’s words had rung through Mustafa’s mind as poignantly as the musings of a mystic: Life and business are rather simple, after all—to make a success of either, you’ve got to hang on to the knack of putting yourself in the other person’s place.
Mustafa had sat alone in the store office staring at the bulbous Indigo iMac G3 as if it were a burning bush. (He was trying to convince Uncle Adad to buy a sleeker laptop.) Only after the monitor dimmed from inactivity, stirring him, did he blink himself out of his daydream. A tremor of understanding—almost spiritual in nature—had rushed through him, so he had reached into his bag and pulled out the Quran his mother had given him as a going-away present the day he’d left Aleppo. (“It belonged to your father,” Rana Totah had said to her only son. “I made the case myself. It will keep you safe in America!” She had pecked his cheeks, adding, “Even though I know you will never sit still long enough to read it. You always want to go, go, go, just like your father, just like right now . . .”) Sitting in the office, Mustafa unzipped the silky, gold-colored case, and he thumbed several pages of the Holy Book, which indeed, he never found time to read. The familiarity of the Arabic script soothed him, though, like the memory of the sound of Rana’s voice, telling him goodbye. (Mother tongue—no wonder they called it that.) Then he tapped the keyboard and brought the monitor back to life, and he let his eyes drift back and forth between Mr. Wrigley’s words and Allah’s as revealed to the great prophet.
Mustafa hadn’t been quite the same after experiencing, in this way, this queer collision of cultures—the digital and the analog; the secular and the religious; the American and the Arab. The store hadn’t been the same to him, either. Uncle Adad’s little capitalist enterprise began to impress him as a more humane endeavor, for he felt certain this Mr. Wrigley, while special, could not be the only one of his ilk with such forthright compassion. Indeed if, as purported by Sir William, this Gandhi of gum, it was only the man who truly understands that people and their feelings are essential to the ability of his products to appeal to the masses, if only the empathetic man could truly succeed, then Uncle Adad’s store was filled with neatly designed bags and cartons and cans of the evidence of something vital: the inherent power of the people. These products, so the rigorous Mr. Wrigley had affirmed, were popular because their makers realized they were for the people, and as such, had to be of the people. Coca-Cola was, of course, a sterling example of this principle; the proof was in its universal triumph. But so was everything from Planter’s Peanuts to Kit Kat candy bars, from Snickers to Campbell’s Soup, from Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to StarKist Tuna. They were all splendidly democratic in some distinctly American way. Conversely, any product that failed had had its day in the court of public opinion and, for better or worse, on the grounds of its inability to strengthen or sustain the people, been ruled unconstitutional.
Mustafa accepted and internalized this: Every stick of Wrigley’s was redolent of the republic. And for him, America, once as foreign and unthinkable a destination as Mars, once as distant and virtual as www.wrigley.com, acquired a realness, as well as some of the specific properties of his favorite product, Wrigley’s gum: a familiarity, a fathomable appeal, a surprising and substantive complexity that challenged the showy surfaces of its vibrant packaging—and, yes, a sweetness.
He told no one of his quiet discovery; his uncle and his cousins would have thought he was crazy. America wasn’t sweet to them; it was bitter. It was also stony and cold, not to mention potentially dangerous, more like one of those brick cartons of Green Giant chopped spinach in the freezer bin that few of the regular customers bought. (That big grin on the giant’s face hid the potential destructiveness of his might—he was a giant, after all—beware!) No, you had to boil this place out of its rock-hard state in order to extract and enjoy its nutrients. That was America to his relatives. But, armed with the more flattering implications of his private wisdom, Mustafa began to approach each day’s work with a new sense of pride. Now, every time he slid a box cutter through a cardboard case of Wrigley’s products to release the bulk of its contents, he felt he was committing an act of civility. The dexterity with which he plucked a fallen five-stick pack of gum back into its carton or stacked fifteen-stick packs onto the end-cap displays acquired a newfound care, a near pianistic tenderness.
It was, of course, these loving and lingering touches he applied to his tasks that had caught Alicia’s eye, for if a man cared this much about gum, how much might he, given half a chance, care about a girl? How tenderly might he touch her?
During a quiet moment following the after-school rush, a few hours after Alicia had called him “Skinny Israel,” Mustafa asked his cousin Malik what he thought she meant.
Malik, bored with the question, was more interested in reading one of his beloved Superman comic books, the latest issue of which was open before him now as he leaned on the side counter. He said cynically, “I don’t know. I think she believes you are the hero who will bring peace to the Middle East.”
Jamil, Malik’s younger brother, who also worked in the store, shadowboxed and shuffled over to a smirking Mustafa, and jabbed him playfully in the chest. Winking at his brother, he whispered, “Aww, what’s wrong, Mustafa? You know, Malik, I do believe our little cousin wishes what the pretty girl really means is that she wants him to bring peace to her middle east.”
Mustafa had pretended not to find his cousin’s vulgarity funny, and when Uncle Adad yelled at them to get back to work, it was easy to disengage from the camaraderie with his cousins, because not only was he still brooding over “Skinny Israel,” but he was also thinking about tasting, for the first time, homemade red beans. He stared at the triple-stacked rows of one-pound bags of Camellia beans on a shelf nearby. “Famous New Orleans Red Beans” and “Since 1923,” the package with the bright red flower at the top proudly announced, and he guessed these were the beans Alicia had in mind. They must be, for patrons, he had observed, bought them with an almost religious weekly rhythm, as if Monday were a leguminous Sabbath.
Hunger would, indeed, play an important role in the relations of Mustafa and Alicia, as it does, metaphorically, in all matters of love and in the activity Uncle Adad had mimed to Mustafa along the bank of the Aleppo River. Two months would pass, and it would be Ramadan—the Muslim season of fasting, of holy hunger—before Mustafa finally resolved to meet Alicia, disobey Uncle Adad’s cautionary dictate, and submit to his curiosity; that is, his intellectual craving.
He was in fact starving—in the way that only a slightly irreverent nineteen-year-old male during mid-afternoon on the first day of Ramadan can be—when he came out of the little stockroom from his break. Looking out the large glass windows toward the street, he saw Alicia reaching into her bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, which gleamed bright yellow in the early December sunlight, refracting with the promise of slice after slice of greasy delight, some wondrous blend of populism and pleasure. As he watched this girl who had expressed a complicated desire for him slide a golden chip into her mouth and silently crunch it with satisfaction, the confrontation of his own mode of denial with her casual air of fulfillment empowered him with the will to act, his low-caloric delirium alchemizing into a jolt of energy, a metabolic burst of courage.
He paused at the edge of the checkout counter to look into the mirror near a display of cheap sunglasses. His fresh haircut, a flattering fade, accentuated the best features of his naturally tanned face. The sharp lines of the cut darted at his temples, arrowing toward his marbled eyes, an unprecedented swirl of blues and greens and grays with flecks of white, as if Moneted by Providence in a random act of ocular Impressionism. Uncle Adad was sitting up on his stool behind the cash register waiting on customers, but Mustafa could feel his gaze. From his perch, Adad was aware of every movement in the store. His acute vigilance was all the surveillance system he needed. In his most ecstatic moments of observation, he went from merely seeing to being a seer, displaying a near-prophetic ability to predict what was about to happen in the store. During Mustafa’s first week at work he had demonstrated his skills by whispering what almost every customer was going to buy or, in more showy moments of predilection, to steal. Malik had the gift as well, and Mustafa sensed that his cousin, who was busy in the back mopping up a puddle of milk, and his uncle were exchanging a rippling, telepathic plea for him to stop primping in the mirror. Primping was necessary only if you were in pursuit of attention, and a particular kind of attention at that. They wanted him, so the tension of their unspoken prudence said to Mustafa, to take two steps away from the door, through which the potentially “bad business” girl had just exited, and finish his break inside, and then get his butt back to work. But their reticence said something else to Mustafa, for Uncle Adad could have simply dispatched him to the office for a roll of cash register receipt paper or the reading glasses he was always forgetting on his desk. Or Malik could have told him to come mop up the milk. They could have easily stopped him from going after Alicia—but they did not. In their hesitancy, Mustafa read a tacit encouragement. Uncle Adad had his beloved Aunt Zahirah; Malik had Sanaa, the pretty girl from Damascus, whom he was going to marry next year. The older men must have, without even realizing it, actually wanted their young male kin to sample the company of a woman, to test the power of his manliness. Mustafa assumed this to be true (and it was), and he stared out the window with water-lily-eyed want. Alicia had paused at the first island of gas pumps and was looking back at him. As he began walking out to meet her, Uncle Adad’s and Malik’s eyes lifted from their routine busyness and locked across the room, just in front of Mustafa. Their restraint, a mix of anxiety and permissiveness, held, and Mustafa took another step forward, and then another, moving gracefully through the caution tape of their affection.
Alicia’s heart, like most hearts, could rarely be said to race, but what is the sudden vision of love approaching, if not an emotional approximation of the thrill of Churchill Downs? There is a galloping swiftness to young love. A loping and a lurching forward. A remarkable velocity of feeling. No wonder we still measure the force of great engines by the accumulated power of horses. We could quantify the pull of passion by it, too. Lust, even. Love—it wants to leave all of its rivals behind. To get there first. To win—and what purse grander than a human heart? Never mind that Alicia and Mustafa were in New Orleans, Louisiana. That it was December. No matter where you are when it happens, it’s as if you are in Louisville, Kentucky—in early May, in a big hat or a bow tie—cheering yourself on to victory.
Alicia knew nothing of the famous Derby or its rituals, including the sipping of mint juleps, but whenever she saw or even thought of the dreamy-eyed foreigner from the Quicky Mart, she knew the sweet intoxication of desire. She knew nothing of saccharined and spearminted bourbon in silver cups. But nineteen and lonely—the existential equivalent of a fresh, fragrant leaf of mint being crushed into sugar—she was particularly vulnerable to the whiskey of romance. And it to her.
Of course, it had been the disinhibiting effects of desire that had pressed Alicia, a somewhat shy girl who had been mostly “raised right,” as they say, to flirt with Mustafa in the first place. Red beans? Red beans! Where had that come from? She didn’t even know how to cook a pot of red beans—or anything else, really. Mama Joon had never been able to keep her in the kitchen long enough to learn how to cut an onion properly. In fact, she associated the smell of raw seasoning vegetables (onions, celery, garlic) with the hours and hours of time and labor it would take to cook whatever it was they were intended to flavor. A gumbo. A stew. Or, yes, a pot of beans. The impatience of her youth was incompatible with such rigors. But her little lie to Mustafa about cooking for him had set something simmering in him; she had seen it brewing in his eyes. As she watched him come out of the store right now, her mind shot through to a time when he would ask her about the meal she’d offered, and she’d have to confess her culinary incompetence. It would occur during some lighthearted, postcoital, pillow-talkish moment that had turned playful. Him: What! You lied to me? Her (giggling): I’m sorry. Neck nibbles of forgiveness. Penance? A non-negotiable submission to a round two.
But first, here came Mustafa now, walking toward her with a gangly gait, emboldened by a catalytic hunger. Here she was chomping on another Lay’s potato chip, riveted by the fantasy of what today might do to tomorrow.
The closer he got to her, the wider his grin became, as if she had the power to incite good humor. He stopped abruptly, for fear that if he took another step he would burst into laughter. Yes, he wanted to greet her with a smile, but if he was cackling uncontrollably, he would appear a fool. The pause was just the respite he needed to relax into the winsomeness with which a young charmer should step to a girl, and he bobbed his head back, chinning a handsome hello.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Alicia.”
“I know.” He had heard someone call her name once, though he had forgotten how to pronounce it. “Hello . . . Alicia,” he said, trying out the enunciation for the first time, liking, without even realizing it, the familiar Al-essence on the tip of his tongue, the lingual affiliation of the girl with his god.
“And you are . . . ,” she prompted him.
“Who me?” He looked away, up at the $1.15 Regular gas sign, then back at her with an arched, accusatory right eyebrow. “Me . . . I am Skinny Israel.”
“Skinny Who?” Now it was her turn to grin, mostly with incomprehension.
“That name you call me.”
She shook her head. “I never called you any name.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, stepping a little closer. “You say you want to cook for me—the red beans.”
“Right,” she said, flinching with guilt.
“Okay—and then you say I am the skinny country of the Jew.”
She hunched her shoulders upon hearing what were to her Mustafa’s inscrutable words. He was speaking okay English, but they were still going to need an interpreter.
“Skinny Israel . . . Skinny Israel . . . ,” he repeated. His voice had gone high-pitched, falsetto, mimicking hervoice, succeeding just enough for her to untangle the last few syllables.
“Oh, God!” She laughed, with the gusto that comes from being in on a joke. “No! Skinny . . . as . . . a . . . rail. It’s just something we say. ‘Skinny as a rail.’ I don’t even know what it really means. All I can think of is like a railroad track, maybe. Or, I don’t know, like streetcar tracks. You know, the rails are what the wheels roll on.” She put her hand out and sliced it forward through the air of confusion. “A rail is narrow. Skinny. Like you!”
Streetcar tracks? He had ridden the St. Charles line one day shortly after coming to town. Poking his head out the window, he had felt like a bad little boy, though the breeze had kissed his face, absolving him of mischief. That is, until the driver had—Hey, you—brought him back to the accountability of adulthood. He closed his eyes now and envisioned the long, chugging ride from Canal Street to Audubon Park and back. He saw the heavy, grooved iron wheels nuzzling the tracks; the narrowness of his frame, his profile slight enough, no doubt, to fit snuggly into the metallic embrace of those wheels that transported passengers into and out of the heart of New Orleans. And his head fell back as his laughter, harmonizing with the streetcar clanging in his head, drowned out his embarrassment. When he opened his eyes to Alicia’s animated delight, he wished he could have been more mortified, if that would have made her laugh harder.
They were both still smiling when he said, “So you don’t like the skinny boys?”
“I didn’t say—”
“Ah, you say, you say . . .”
His saying “say” was their cue not to say anything else, a license to look at each other—and feel. Language had distanced them, divided them with its wall of words. Action had brought them together. Close.
They were only about a foot apart. Mustafa had never been this close to the brownness of a Black girl’s face, unless you counted the way he had sometimes almost touched his nose to a television or a computer screen to inhale the prettiness of the dark-skinned girl in Destiny’s Child, having ogled his way past Beyoncé to the relative exotica of Kelly Rowland. That’s who Alicia reminded him of. Beyoncé, with her Arabian glow, was too much like the beautiful Syrian women he knew, including his mother, to pique his interest; Kelly’s forthright foreignness, on the other hand, had seduced his exploratory impulse, her dark womanhood pointing his desire toward, well, a destination, intensifying his passion to the heights of a masculine quest: wanderlust. For, oh, there was a moment in the music video for their latest song, “Bills, Bills, Bills,” near the end, right at the 3:40 mark, where Kelly had a close-up when she said “you” as she pointed both of her index fingers directly at the camera, at you, at Mustafa—her lips puckered for as long as you cared to pause the scene on the computer. (No, he didn’t always end up going down corporate wormholes when he went exploring on Uncle Adad’s iMac.) And another close-up of her at 3:53 saying “think,” with one finger tapping her right temple and the other her left cheek in pantomimed pensiveness. The combination of the “you” and the “think” was a blend of sensuousness and contemplativeness he found immensely gratifying, and endlessly rewindable. He couldn’t help endowing Alicia with Kelly’s alluring complexity, and her proximity to him right now was a wonder, a real-life encounter with American-girl glamor. Only his natural chivalrousness—and a faint paralysis at being so near to her—kept him from reaching up to touch Alicia’s smooth brown face.
The silver crucifix she was wearing shined up at him, mercifully giving him a reason to avoid her stare, and he let his eyes angle down at the fortuitously positioned Christ on a chain. A fleur-de-lis adorned each end of the cross, surrounding the martyred saint in a feminine embrace. Mustafa had seen this floral symbol all around New Orleans, and he assumed it held some significance he was unaware of, as did the letters, INRI, engraved above Jesus’s drooping head. The mystery of all that, nestled as it was in Alicia’s bosom, coalesced for him into something of a sacred lust. He felt helpless, dumb with desire. But what did it all mean? Swooning with hunger from the day’s fast and, more so, for her, he heard only one answer—Uncle Adad’s warning—love.
Is he staring at my breasts? she wondered. Aww . . . his first real, if awkward, show of actually wanting her. She pinched the crucifix and twirled it between her fingers. Yes, he was probably just another boy about to run some game on her. Cute accent and comic mangling of the vernacular aside, Mustafa had all the makings of a Creole Don Juan, and she knew one of those when she saw one. She had fallen prey to the Seventh Ward boy/Sixth Ward girl passionfest before (the light-skinned-guy, ...
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